I've been serving on grad admissions committees at MIT for 5 years - in EECS and Media Lab

If you want to get into a PhD at a place like MIT, here's a thread with some advice based on my observations

1/13

1. Grades do matter, especially in courses that are important for your chosen field

2. Research matters, even more than grades

3. Publications matter, but letters of recommendation matter even more

4. Your statement of purpose should be the cherry on top of the cake

2/13

When I say grades matter, it doesn't mean that you need 100/100 or A+ in every course. It does mean that you are expected to have strong competence (close to straight A/A+/A-) in technical courses relevant to your field of interest

3/13

While grades show competence, a PhD is about research. So, the more your application demonstrates research potential, the higher your chances for acceptance. It's not about the number of papers (if any), but about the quality of research you pursue

4/13

This is why the best evaluation of research potential often comes from letters of recommendation (LoRs)

Letters shed light on technical competence, creativity, work ethic, & personal interaction. All of which are important for a successful PhD

5/13

THREAD: Remote Teaching
I’ve spoken to a few people recently about our remote teaching approach and thought I’d share some of our ideas here for anyone who many find them useful.
1. We use Google Classroom and post lessons which include videos, Google Forms and any other docs

2. Classrooms are set up so that lessons are saved as ‘Topics’ each week. The Topic is named as Term/Week/Date for easy navigation. This is consistent so that Classrooms all look similar to pupils to provide a sense of routine - just like you would in a lesson

3. We have a dummy Classroom which all teachers can access which includes Classrooms for all subjects - this gives us a ‘pupil view’ to make it easier to help if parents ask for support and means we can share lessons across subjects and direct to good models

4. We chose to collapse our timetable rather than continue with our own classes. Our suggested timetable is at least 5 hours per day but includes more Art, Music, PSHE than our usual timetable as we felt that was appropriate to support pupils at this time

5. In most subjects, one person looks after the whole year group. This includes making lessons, looking after the GC, dealing with Qs, & giving feedback for that year group. Subjects have a max. of 3 lessons per week/year group supplemented with Bedrock Vocab & other platforms.

My thoughts about Covid in schools-
Our studies are crap. We haven't put appropriate resources into studying this. Merging "in-person school" v "remote school" across the country makes little sense since there's so much heterogeneity in what "in-person school" looks like. 🧵

A teacher in Louisiana in an area with high rates of covid & in-person school, has a class with just 2 students in it. The entire school has 37 students and 12 staff, in a building that can hold hundreds.
Should this school's data be merged with a school that's fully open?

How would merging such disparate data, and everything in-between impact our understanding of Covid in schools? What about when we compare it to the rates in children who are in virtual school?

Things often not considered that should be... Are kids in pods? Are kids doing virtual school in community centers/ churches/ other group settings? Are youth sports or other extracurricular school activities (music, etc) happening in-person. Heterogeneity exist in this group too.

What's asymptomatic testing of children in the community like? We know that children are under-tested, how can we say something is safe if we are NOT TESTING children at the same rate as the rest of the population. We can't embrace the "don't ask (test) don't tell" apprach here.

This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

Beyond obvious changes, like $$$ tuition prices, the system has changed from when we were in school. Nearly all colleges use so-called “merit-aid” to pay kids for good grades.

This is NOT need-based financial aid, and it’s not about expanding college access for the poor... it's an arms race by schools scrambling for US News rankings.

Tuition list prices are misleading at this point. College seats are more like airline seats, and your kid's actual price is calculated based on everything from his zip code... SAT scores... how much interest he and his cohort have shown in school X (yes they can figure that out.)

Ron has seen NYC high school classes in which three kids were offered admission to the same small school at three different prices-- and *none* of them had applied for need-based financial aid!

Given @GavinWilliamson failure to apologise this week for 'last-minute' decisions on schools policy during the pandemic, we thought it might be useful to put to together one handy thread of every U-turn from the @educationgovuk since April last

Free school meals will come up a lot in this thread, but here is the first governmental U-turn before the Easter Holidays. (2/43) #FSM

.@educationgovuk then decided not to fund #FSM in the following half-term break, they changed their minds after a public outcry.

Taking a break from #FSM, we head straight into the #Alevels2020 exams debacle, with Scotland’s grade U-turn putting pressure on the @educationgovuk (4/43)

Ministers in Westminster were determined not to U-turn

Grade Awarding 2021 - a thread.
1. For pupils and parents; it sounds daft but there isn’t much you can control right now. Teacher will play the main role in awarding grades, and there may well be some time or formal exam for subjects. But we don’t know exactly what yet.

2. What we do know is that all work pupils have done, their resilience over such a difficult time, their drive to keep going will make a difference to them. It’s never been more important for pupils to keep going, and keep engaging with the provision a school provides.

3. To our pupils? Have faith that the work you are doing will pay off. Please don’t lose heart right now. We love you lots and we all want you to excel. We are always here for you.

4. For school leaders - we need to build a year story. Right now they need a narrative that stresses the need to keep engaging in lessons. A letter every two weeks won’t get that job done. It’s never been more that pupils and parents feel connected to a school and we have clear

5. Communications cycles. Media - twitter/YouTube etc are vital tools for keeping our pupils and parents connected to school. This news cycle is vital for building a cultural expectation of what will happen when pupils set foot again in our school buildings.

Actually reading through the Ofqual/DfE consultation rather than what has been said about it by others. It's not making me feel any better.

But, but, but...! This is such an unreasonable question!

Just hold the **** exams, for God's sake!

This passage makes zero sense to me. It's like a Boris announcement on the importance of following guidance. NEA is important, but only if the kids have all done it. It's the only evidence you can use in Art, but it's ok if it's not very good. Oh, and you can just make it up.

Oh, and if all else fails, just make it up using whatever stuff you can find to justify what you want to give.

I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic

The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight

The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal

The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.

THREAD on the Ofqual consultation.

The exams situation is a fiasco on top of a debacle. Yes - loads of kids have missed out on schooling. That is bad. Yes - the provision across the system is the most unequal it has been in living memory. That is bad.

The solution proposed by the DfE and Ofqual is to get teachers to submit a grade that they think their students are “performing at”. Here there are a number of problems:

Problem 1: what does “performing at” a grade even mean? An exam grade is comparative - if someone has any particular grade all it tells you is where they are compared to their peers. There is NO SUCH THING as “grade 6 content” or “working at grade 6”.

This is as true in maths, where content is cumulative, as it is in something like English, where examination is much more subjective. If you ask teachers all across the country to grade, you will get substantial variability because objective criteria simply do not exist.

That’s not our fault, it’s not a training need, its not that we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s literally the way the system has been designed. You can’t train someone in a concept that does not exist.

What does it take to sustain screwiness in the way the world works? Mostly, it's just good people, trying their best to get us to a better place... within constraints which pretty much preclude us actually getting anywhere! A case in point with

These authors come across as hugely committed to something we might all agree upon: improving young people's experiences of physical education through better school-based-interventions. Sounds great? Agreed, & pretty much everything about their study models best practice 🥳

Sadly, established "best practice" involves further embedding the medicalisation of PE as if it should be about the potential contribution of physical activity to everything from quality of life, self-perception & cognition to the likelyhood of becoming healthy & active adults 🤯

We're reminded of the Chief Medical Officer's "recommended guidelines of 60 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day for healthy growth and development" 👇 This is a focus on what we can easily measure (generic) rather than on what we might value (individual).

We get recognition that PE "is not merely an opportunity for children to engage in PA" but that's linked to its role in "the development of knowledge & skills to foster their PA engagement throughout life" - so further focus on health outcomes. A long way from @meaningfulPE 🙄

a higher and higher % of DMs, emails, etc. to me are from indians asking about their genetics. since there are 700 million indians on the internet. makes sense

i'll be publishing my 6K-word essay in indian genetics https://t.co/ycMGoZh13z

but some general points 1/n

- there's a lot of structure. which means you can look at an indian's genome and get an immediate sense of things and a little digging get's granularity very quickly

eg i guessed @suryasays family's jati after about 15 minutes (he was vague about this and had to ask mom)

- a lot of the variation is not partitioned geographically. very different from europe & china where geography is the dominant predictive variable.

indians have lots of structure which means non-geographical (jati) matter a lot. tamil brahmins more like UPites than other tamils

- the 'india-cline' pioneered by reich patterson is pretty explanatory. on one end you have west eurasian adjacent groups. jatts ppl in the NW and upper caste. and other end something away from them (more toward andamese). dalits, southerners etc.

- some groups are off the cline. that means they are not well modeled by the distribution. e.g.,

* parsies (75% iranian)
* bengalis (5-20% east asian)

What is the Quincy Institute?
What was the purpose of its establishment?
Who is the Mastermind behind it ?
I’ll explain in the following that Quincy institute was founded by the most powerful and famous Islamic regime lobbyist @tparsi based in the United States of America .

1. @QuincyInst for Responsible Statecraft
An American think tank founded in 2019
Location: Washington DC, USA
The initial budget of this institution; Includes half a million dollars from the Soros Foundation (George Soros)
And the Cook Foundation (Charles J. Cook).

2- George Soros,Hungarian-American businessman and a Billionaire, investor, political activist, and an author.Soros is the Chairman of the Board of the Open Society Foundation and Soros Capital Management and is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Soros Capital.

3- Charles J.Koch, a businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the Chairman and CEO of Cook Industries.
He is the eldest child of Fr. Cook, the founder of Cook Industries, member of the Cook family and one of the main inventors of the new gasoline refining technology.

4- As described by the founders of Quincy; The purpose of the Quincy Institute (Research Institute and Office of Studies and Research) is to promote ideas to redirect the American foreign policy from endless wars around the world .

On October 16 2020, a secondary school teacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded with a meat cleaver in the street of a small town 20 miles down the Seine from Paris. 1/x

Paty's murderer, a young Chechen refugee, had never met the teacher. The killer was incited to the crime by a multi-day campaign of defamation and disinformation on French social media. 2/x

For 5 years, Paty had taught his classes a unit on free speech and its limits in a democratic society. As part of the discussion, he showed his students some of the famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons - after inviting those who might be offended to leave and then rejoin the class. 3/x

One parent of one student - not the student herself - then set in motion a campaign of denunciation against Paty. And the result was a crime that shocked France and pulled tens of thousands to vigils and protests. 4/x

France has suffered terrible crimes in the name of religion before the Paty killing. We're only 5 years from the horrifying nightclub attacks that killed 130 in November 2015. But past attacks caught France by surprise. This murder announced itself in advance. 5/x

1/

Supercharge your skills with effective learning⚡️

AVOID:
⛔️Wasting time with inefficient strategies ⏳
⛔️Spinning your wheels in tutorial hell ⚙️

A summary of the most effective learning strategies GUARANTEED to make you a better developer

🧵👇

2/

⚡️Deliberate practice

It's good to know the fundamentals well, but you will never improve by sticking to practicing only what you already know.

The alternative to this is deliberate practice...

3/

Deliberate practice means:
✅Practicing things you're weak at
✅Constantly pushing the boundaries of your knowledge and skills.

Before each learning session, ask yourself whether what you will learn adheres to the above.

If it doesn't, learn something that does instead

4/

⚡️Scoping the subject (credit to @AliAbdaal for this concept)

When new information can be 'docked' to an existing framework of knowledge, you can understand and retain the information better because you can relate it to what you already know and understand...

5/

Build a 'map' of the entire subject you're studying 🗺

Include all of the sub-headings that exist within that subject, make it a nested structure (I do this as a bullet point list in @NotionHQ)

You've then got a skeleton list to 'hang' your knowledge from as you go along 💀